Sunday, January 21, 2007

Odds n' sods

Back when I didn't have a life, I did most of my blog posting over the weekend, which was frustrating, because my very few regular readers all did have lives, and they followed the more typical pattern of most blog readers/writers -- they updated their blogs, and read/commented on other blogs, during the work week, in stolen moments while they were at work.

Now, I have a life, too, and a very busy life it is, so on weekends I can rarely find two spare consecutive seconds to sit down and do anything on the Internet.

Nonetheless, it does seem to me like there were a few minor, random things I wanted to mention, so... lemme think here...

Oh yeah. I found this blog while I was surfing around the other day. Fellow River City blogger, apparently freelances for the LEO, which is our local kneejerk liberal rag. He writes better than I do, and is even more rabidly opinionated than I am. He seems to have some geek interests and I find his blog interesting. I'm fairly sure if he and I ever met in person we'd hate each other on sight, but, still, his blog's a fun read. Give it a shot. He doesn't seem to ever bother responding to his comments, though.

On the homefront, we got the SuperKids back from their dad this weekend and all is chaos, but it's fun chaos. Apples to Apples last night (I won!) and Magic: the Gathering today (I won again!)

Tomorrow, of course, I return to Craptastic City, where we are all still on mandatory overtime, due to insanely excessive call volume arising from the sheer blithering idiocy of our management. Now, when I say 'we are all still on mandatory overtime', I of course merely mean we peons in the trenches who actually take the calls, and who had no say whatsoever in the monumentally fucktarded management decisions that led to this situation. Management itself seems to be content to work their normal hours, and, well, who can blame them? They have the really really tough jobs, involving (a) going out and bringing in huge volumes of new business that we are not sufficiently staffed to adequately handle and (b) making the hard decisions about forcing everyone underneath them to work longer hours to try and help ameliorate the inevitable consequences of (a).

Well, I've covered all that before. Still, things reached new pinnacles of hysterical absurdity on Friday at my place of work, where our supervisors came around in the late afternoon to advise us that (a) no matter how inclement the weather is, Craptastic City will remain open (yes, even if we get so much snow and ice from the predicted storm system supposedly moving in tonight that the entirety of River City, Kentucky, and Indiana are declared Federal disaster areas and the governor himself goes on the air and declares no one but emergency personnel are allowed on the roads, all of us employees must understand that our place of work is still open and we are responsible for getting to our shifts on time) and (b) to help us get to work on time, on Sunday night, if the weather starts looking bad, management will call employees up and order them to report to hotels near Craptastic City (at corporate expense, of course) so we can be up bright and early the next day to man the phones.

So, let me recap, just for those of you who haven't been following the workplace saga closely, let me recap: Prior to Christmas this year at work, we all got a Christmas bonus -- a small plate with the company logo on it that, according to the little note card that came with it, we should not actually eat off, because the chemicals used to cure it were toxic. After that enormous and heartwarming gesture of appreciation towards all us lowly peasant types from management, our call volume went absolutely batshit and has stayed that way ever since. After two weeks of this literally hellish call volume, two weeks where all us CSRs were spending our entire shifts immersed in a corrosive, battering environment of non-stop calls from inevitably hostile participants, all of whom opened their conversations with us using some extremely aggravated variation of the phrase "I HAVE BEEN ON HOLD FOR HALF AN HOUR NOW", management decided to finally resolve these ongoing issues by instituting mandatory overtime... for us, not them.

And now, two weeks into that, they've told us that no matter how bad or extreme the weather gets, our place of work will never EVER be closed, we will be held responsible for getting there through any conceivable climate or road conditions, and to make this easier for us to comply with, they will require us to leave our homes if it seems like extreme or disastrous weather is imminent (presumably, abandoning our families to fend for themselves amidst said extreme, disastrous weather conditions) and stay in a hotel near work, so we can be sure to show up for our shifts.

I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to getting a call from some supervisor or team leader at Craptastic City in the event such a meteorological cataclysm should occur, ordering me to report to a hotel so I can be sure of being at work the next day. I will laugh and laugh and laugh. And then I will say extremely rude and vulgar things, and then I will hang up the phone, and laugh some more.

Lastly, if you haven't yet seen the sound and the fury I've kicked up over at my poli blog with my latest entry there (an essay on exactly why it is conservatives all suck so bad), well, you should go check it out. Assuming, of course, you already know what the URL is, because if you don't, I ain't gonna tell you. Unless, of course, you email me and ask me and I feel like telling you. And in order to do that, you'll need to either already have my email address (in which case, you almost certainly already have the poli-blog url) or you'll have to be smart enough to dig up an email address on me from somewhere.

Super Adorable Kid got THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE on DVD for Christmas, and she's watching it now. What does this movie teach those of us who have reached double digits in age? Well, other than the fact that little kids look really dopey in capes and armor, Liam Neeson doesn't sound anything like an omnipotent lion, and talking beavers should almost certainly be skinned for their pelts, not a whole hell of a lot... oh, wait, yeah, one more thing... Hollywood needs to keep its hands off THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. They did okay with LORD OF THE RINGS, but it made them cocky. Adapting J.R.R. Tolkien is one thing; there you just need a big special effects budget and a lot of people who look good riding horses. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, actually knew how to crank out a solid story with real characters speaking well written dialogue and doing somewhat unpredictable things in the course of a reasonably complex plot with an actual point to it; that kind of thing is way out of Hollywood's depth.

I can only hope that whoever HBO gets to adapt A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, it ain't the bozos who made this particular pile of shit. But I have little hope there. As with C.S. Lewis, George R.R. Martin can write, too. I have a feeling even A GAME OF THRONES will end up being way over the head of anyone HBO can come up with to do an adaptation.

Okay, I can smell homemade beef stew for dinner. Those of you who aren't eating with us tonight... sucks to be you. But drop by sometime. SuperFiancee's cooking is always worth the trip.

I, on the other hand, deeply love anonymous dipshits who can only just barely manage to string a sentence together, especially when they disagree with something I've said. It's enormously validating. Thanks so much for dropping by.

The same one that I saw, apparently, which is to say, one which was horrible to the point of being nearly unwatchable. The one with bad dialogue, terrible casting, and pointless added special-effects sequences which appear nowhere in the vastly superior book. Which film did you see?

Highlander: I can only hope that whoever HBO gets to adapt A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, it ain't the bozos who made this particular pile of shit.

I'm curious - is this speculation on your part, or has HBO actually acquired the rights to ICE AND FIRE? And does that mean Martin is actually going to finish the damn thing?

Finally:

if the weather starts looking bad, management will call employees up and order them to report to hotels near Craptastic City (at corporate expense, of course) so we can be up bright and early the next day to man the phones.

Seriously? Holy shit, that is the *stupidest* thing I have ever heard in my life. If I didn't work in the private sector myself, I might even be surprised.

I never heard one good thing about the EARTHSEA adaptation, so I've stayed well away from it.

While I deeply, deeply wish no further adaptations of NARNIA would be made, I am drearily aware of just how badly the various studios want to try to find another LOTR franchise. During the six year stretch that the RINGS trilogy was coming out, it very nearly supported the theater going movie experience on its own. Since then, there has bene a desperate effort to snatch up the rights to any even vaguely similar franchise in hopes of getting something anywhere near as successful.

It's a similar impulse that fuels all the comic book movies -- get something that people like there, and you can churn out sequels forever. Unfortunately, we seem to be seeing that the movies in a particular superhero franchise will only remain watchable for two movies at best; after that, it's all down hill.

While I deeply, deeply wish no further adaptations of NARNIA would be made, I am drearily aware of just how badly the various studios want to try to find another LOTR franchise.

I don't have any objection to an adaptation of NARNIA per se, it's just that the creative people involved in this particular adaptation are, not to put to fine a point on it, *terrible*. I mean, Andrew fricking Adamson gets to do an adaptation of the beloved NARIA books? WTF?

You're right, Highlander - the NARNIA adaptations are clearly an attempt to mimic the success of LOTR.

What I hated about LWW was that it looked and felt completely *soulless*, as if the people involved had no feeling for the source material other than as a way to make money. It seemed like just another big budget Hollywood movie, wherease the LOTR, despite many flaws, always seemed like a labour of love by those involved.

I can only wonder what might've been if someone like, say Terry Gilliam or Alfonso Cuaron (who did a terrific job with the 3rd Harry Potter movie) had directed the movie instead of the guy who did SHREK.